PURSUE Record — DOW-UAP-PR23, Unresolved UAP Report, Iraq, December 2022: Iraq

DOW-UAP-PR23 is a ten-second military infrared sensor video submitted by U.S. Central Command to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and declassified as part of PURSUE Release 01 on May 8, 2026. The record covers an incident in Iraq in December 2022 and carries an "Unresolved" designation — meaning investigators have not produced a definitive explanation for what the sensor recorded. No incident date beyond the month and year is listed in the public metadata.

What this record contains

The record consists of a single file part: a short infrared video clip originating from a U.S. military airborne platform operating over Iraq. It was submitted to AARO by U.S. Central Command alongside a companion mission report, DoW-UAP-D18. The official description notes that the accompanying mission report described the phenomenon as "flying west to east." The video itself, per the government's own account, "depicts an area of contrast moving from the bottom left to the top right of the sensor field-of-view," exiting the frame near the top right corner at approximately the six-second mark. The Department of War explicitly states in its release materials that the video description is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination.

Beyond the location (Iraq), the sensor platform type, altitude, heading, and mission purpose are not disclosed in the public release. The incident date field is listed as N/A, with only the year 2022 specified in the record title and blurb.

Sensor & operational context

Infrared sensors aboard U.S. military aircraft do not record visible light — they detect thermal contrast, rendering the scene as gradients of relative temperature. What appears as a bright or dark moving region in an IR frame may correspond to a heat-emitting object, a cold atmospheric feature, or an artifact of how the sensor processes the scene. The physics matter here: an "area of contrast" in infrared is not automatically a physical object with defined edges. Motion across the sensor field-of-view can result from the object moving, the aircraft moving, or the sensor gimbal slewing — and without stabilization metadata and camera attitude data, separating those contributions is non-trivial. CENTCOM's operational theater over Iraq in late 2022 involved persistent ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) activity, meaning infrared-equipped platforms were routinely airborne, and the sensor footage captured here would have been reviewed by analysts before formal submission to AARO.

The companion document DoW-UAP-D18 — a mission report referenced in the blurb but not described further in the public metadata — presumably contains additional observational detail. Whether that report is itself part of the public release is not specified in the available record summary.

What this does and does not prove

What the record documents is specific and narrow: U.S. Central Command observed something in Iraqi airspace via infrared sensor in December 2022 that it could not immediately explain, submitted the footage formally to AARO, and AARO has not resolved the case to a known cause as of the May 2026 release. That is the entirety of what the official record establishes. It does not establish that the object was exotic, foreign, or anomalous in any extraordinary sense. "Unresolved" is an administrative status reflecting the absence of a confirmed explanation — not the presence of a confirmed anomaly. The ten-second clip and sparse accompanying metadata are insufficient to rule in or out any particular explanation, and the Department of War is explicit that no such ruling has been made.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

DOW-UAP-PR23 sits within the contemporary Department of War sensor-video strand of the PURSUE Release 01 collection — a cohort of 28 videos drawn from recent U.S. military operations and submitted through the AARO pipeline. Unlike the FBI archive documents dating to 1947 or the NASA imagery from crewed spaceflight programs also included in the release, this record represents the active, post-NDAA reporting infrastructure that Congress mandated. Its inclusion alongside resolved cases — balloons, birds, sensor artifacts — reflects AARO's stated intent to demonstrate analytical rigor: some cases get closed, others remain open. This one remains open. You can place it alongside the broader set of unresolved Department of War submissions covered in SkyLens PURSUE coverage to see how the Iraq video compares in detail density and resolution status to its contemporaries in the release.

Editorial note: This analysis is independent commentary on a publicly released document. The original record, source links, and full release metadata are catalogued on the SkyLens UAP files page alongside every other case in the PURSUE Release 01 set.